Re: [help-texinfo] latex to texinfo converstion

[John Gabriele]

On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 12:35 PM, tyler <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was wondering what the best available program for conversion from
> LaTeX to TeXinfo is. I found some old (2002, 2004) threads on this list
> pointing to Python, but the links are now stale. Any pointers?
>

Well, how long is the document? If it were short enough, I'd probably
just hack up some little perl scripts to get me most of the way there,
and then do the rest with the assistance of Emacs and its Texinfo
mode.

If you're converting a manual for a free software project, you could
break it up into pieces and then try to recruit contributors to pitch
in.

If you really do need to automate it as much as possible, you might be
able to find an intermediate format to use. That is, instead of going
directly from LaTeX --> Texinfo, maybe try LaTeX -->
{HTML|Docbook|$something_else} --> Texinfo. If you try to use Docbook
as an intermediate format, maybe check out
[LaTeX2DocBook](http://latex2db.sourceforge.net/)  and then
[docbook2X](http://docbook2x.sourceforge.net/).

That said, I'm not a fan of Docbook, and if going this route would
probably try to use html as the intermediate. Googling around, I found
[this](http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/tools.html#d994e2584) which
refers to [Michael Ernst's
html2texi](http://people.csail.mit.edu/mernst/software/html2texi). So,
I'd probably try one of the LaTeX2html converters with that and see
what comes out. :)

Here's a list of Latex2html's:
<http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=LaTeX2HTML>.

---John